FOCUS
Brenton Brooks
Effect of different dwarfing genes on wheat yield traits
I have been an RPO at CSIRO for the last 10 years. I was involved in several projects with the objective of achieving higher yields in wheat through transferring desirable phenotypic or physiological traits. My current project is examining the impact of transferring chromosomes from rye into wheat to determine which characteristics can contribute to increased yield. My daily routine usually involves nurturing my plants in the glasshouse, or monitoring how they survive in the paddock. Hail and covid have therefore been destructive to project goals in 2020! My background is ‘classical’ plant breeding and I have worked as a breeder on a number of crops in the last 30 years ranging from wheat to cotton. This has been at government organisations and an international breeding company. The cotton company bred coventional and transgenic varieties. The San Remo pasta you eat is likely one of my durum varieties or their derivatives. Before I attended Data School FOCUS I was an R raw recruit. My data collection revolved around manhandling Excel.
Cathrine H Ingvordsen
Weed-Competitive Wheat
Hi, welcome to my Data School Final Project! I joined CSIRO in 2015 leaving Denmark for this great opportunity to work on agriculture in a country with tight link between growers and science and an agricultural sector sustainable without heavy EU subsidies. Before joining Data School my R experience was adopting colleagues scripts and running them on my own data - once figuring out how to load data from another source. Experiencing even more of the power R has on offer in Data School, I’m now determined to find the time to free myself from excel and the errors that can sneak in when I combine field measurements from different sheets - the errors that are complicated or impossible to back track - and make awesome figures.
Elaheh Arjomand
Improved Approaches to Long-Term Monitoring of Decommissioned Onshore Gas Wells in the Northern Territory
I am Elaheh Arjomand and I am doing a Post-doc fellowship on the subject of wellbore integrity and monitoring wells after being decommissioned. I completed my Ph.D. studying the integrity of the cement sheath in petroleum wells after being subjected to pressure and temperature variations at the University of Adelaide in 2018.
Elise-Andree Guerette
Evaluation of high-precision analytical techniques for measuring atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O)
I am an Atmospheric Chemist who has recently joined the Major Greenhouse Gases team (GASLAB) at the Aspendale, VIC site. https://research.csiro.au/acc/capabilities/gaslab/ I started using R as part of my PhD and I was quickly hooked. Coding gives me both extreme joy and deep frustration, depending on whether my code works :) I used R throughout my postdoc and I am now keen to use my R skills in my new role.
Felicity McEnnulty
Monitoring endangered Spotted Handfish populations
I have a background in taxonomic identification of marine invertebrates and plankton. This requires working with data sets of species data and associated environmental data, spatial details and imagery. I have been involved in fieldwork using SCUBA diving to survey for introduced marine pests in Australian ports and to conduct underwater visual counts for species monitoring. I have used Excel, Access and SQL databases to manage data and have some experience in coding using Oracle to manage data and and R to produce graphs.
Gavin Hunter
Preliminary investigations into the population genetics of sea spurge (Euphorbia paralias) in Australia
I am a research scientist in the Temperate Weeds research group of the Managing Invasive Species and Diseases (MISD) research program of Health and Biosecurity. I am a plant pathologist and use classical and DNA-based molecular techniques to investigate the interaction of fungal plant pathogens and their plant hosts. My daily work pattern involves experiments undertaken in the laboratory, glasshouse and quarantine facilities. I had no previous programming skills before Data School but was always very interested in learning programming to broaden my analytical skill set.
Geetha Perera
Screening GM canola for tolerance to aluminium
I am Geetha Perera, a Research Technician with Agriculture and Food based in Canberra. At present I am a part of the Soil Constraint research team in the Crops Program. I had no experience in R before Data School, tried to self-learn but never happened. I have been using Excel extensively to record, summarise and visualise data mostly using bar graphs. My main aim in Data School FOCUS was to learn coding with R to replace the repetitive steps that I follow when working with data sets in Excel.
Greg Rebetzke
How useful is sensor-based biomass prediction when selecting in wheat breeding populations?
I am a research geneticist with a background in quantitative and statistical genetics. My research interest is in understanding the architecture of genetically-complex traits key to improving the water-limited adaptation of rainfed crops. My passion is in delivering these genetics to commercial breeding programs in the development of new and improved crop varieties for use by growers. I am competent in programming in statistics packages (e.g. SAS and ASReml) but was an ‘R-numpty’ (actually still am..!) I see tremendous value in use of R in data-cleaning and storage leading to statistical analysis. Of course, quality analysis relies on an optimal experimental design focussing on the null hpotheses, and then collection of, and interpretation of, quality data. Together, these activities represent around 90% of the experimental process in my research projects. That said, poor and untidy data can significantly lessen the time that can be devoted to the science driving the research and its delivery.
Jose Barrero
Transcriptomic analysis of high-oil transgenic cowpea
My name is Jose Barrero and I am a Research Scientist in Agriculture and Food. Although I have worked mainly with cereals in the past I recently started leading the Cowpea Team in Black Mountain. I have not done any coding before but I generate large datasets that need complex analysis, so that is why I decided to learn a bit of R and to come to Data School as part of my Julius Career Award activities.
Karen Aitken
Sequencing the complex polyploid sugarcane genome
I am a Principal Research Scientist in Agriculture and Food and my main interest is in understanding how polyploidy impacts crop genetic improvement. Before Data School I used SAS or GenStat for statistical analysis and for generating graphs either Excel or SigmaPlot. I joined Data School to learn how to create reproducible graphs from large sequence data sets. I did not have any previous experience using R language before Data School.
Lucia Donskoi
Standardising Learning Evaluation in CSIRO
My name is Lucia Donskoi, and I manage the People Insights team in CSIRO. I have been in CSIRO for 8 years, predominantly in HR Business Partnerting roles. Prior to data school I did not have much experience with coding at all, aside from a little online learning with SQL. My role consists largely of HR based reporting and analysis of our people data, which the team has always done from within excel.
Nicole Murphy
Sustainable livelihoods in Torres Strait
Most of my work is in Torres Strait in collaboration with Traditional Owners, with a focus on stock assessment and harvest strategies for their hand collectable fisheries. I have spent a lot of time underwater collecting data and I now spend a lot of time with data outputs and analyses. I never used code before data school.
Ram Ghimire
Analysing biomass and yield of two contrasting leaf architectures of wheat
My name is Ram Ghimire, currently working as a Research Projects Officer in wheat leaf architecture and yield project. I have been working with data in crop physiology & agronomy for many years but have had no experience in R. Most of my data manipulation and visualisation are done in excel. I came to know about Data School from colleagues and got opportunity to join this year. Before joining Data School, I was used to spending a lot of time working with data mostly in excel spreadsheets. Now, I am delighted to see how amazing R can be for processing and visualisation of the field and laboratory data that I collect every year.
Sam Periyannan
Genetic analysis of stem rust disease resistance in wheat
With the background in genetics, plant breeding and crop pathology, I am currently working as a Scientist at the Crop Immunity group of Traits program of CSIRO Agriculture and Food business unit. As the pathogen causing rust disease of wheat evolves frequently overcoming resistance genes deployed in commercial cultivars, my role at CSIRO is to screen germplasm and wild relatives of cultivated wheat for novel resistance. Through genetic characterisation we identify markers linked to the new resistance thereby enabling rapid breeding of the identified resistance into elite wheat cultivars through marker assisted gene selection.
Shirleen Prasad
Genetics of stress- & domestication-related traits in Bactrocera tryoni
My name is Shirleen Prasad. I am a 3rd year Macquarie University PhD student based at CSIRO. My PhD project investigates the genetic basis of reduced stress resistance in domesticated Queensland fruit flies (Q-fly), Bactrocera tryoni. Before joining Data School, I mostly used excel for data analysis and could only perform basic statistical analysis in R. Gaining competence in R through this course has given me confidence in using R independently.
Sophia Escobar-Correas
Finding gluten proteins in cereal grains
Hello! My name is Sophia, I am a molecular biologist working in proteomics, currently a Postdoctoral Fellow. Before Data School, I coded using Macro (Excel). I used to spend a lot of time cleaning and tidying protein data; I always felt like I could do it faster if I had programming skills. These weeks learning R have changed my daily work. The skills I have obtained have allowed me to fast track the ordinary and focus on new perspectives of my research.
